Brian Chesky’s Vision For Airbnb Going Ahead, Articulated

Airbnb has been out there a lot these last couple of weeks talking about its new product updates and launches, and CEO and Co-Founder Brian Chesky has been surprisingly open about what went wrong from the original vision, how he runs the company and what’s coming in the company’s AI-driven future, even beyond its core.

Now in a new interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, while he goes over the familiar territory he has talked about to me and others in recent days, he also articulates that his future vision for Airbnb is. Worth reading/listening to the short clip, and gives hints to community and connection, which currently is more varpoware in Airbnb’s main product than reality, as being the main focus going ahead, in areas beyond its core of accommodation.

“Our vision for this company is the following: that Airbnb is a marriage of art and science, that we’re a truly creatively-led company. Our two core values are basically design creativity married with technologies and then this idea of community and connection. A company with this real humanistic feel that you come to Airbnb, we ask you a series of questions.

We learn about you. We understand who you are, what you want. We design these incredibly simple interfaces, and then our job as a host is we develop these really robust matching algorithms, and then we can match you to whatever you want. 

And so if we can build this incredibly robust identity system, if we can have the most robust profiles, almost like a physical social network where we can connect people together in this community, if we can use AI to augment customer service, to deeply understand and resolve your issues within seconds, not just minutes or hours, and we can then build these incredibly simple interfaces where we match you to whatever you want in your life, that’s basically the idea of where we’re trying to go. And Jony Ive and his team, they’re working on things just in that area.”